What I Got Wrong (and Right) in 2012

IN WHAT I HOPE will soon cease to be a holiday tradition, this is my annual column where I admit to mistakes, errant phrases and overreaching. You should get comfortable.

I will spare myself no embarrassment. Like William Safire, to whom I credit the idea of an annual mea culpa, I will not attempt to save face retroactively. These are not typos, transpositions of numbers or other copy-editing errors (although I had a few of those too). These are errors of substance and judgment. I can be such an idiot sometimes.

First and worst: I was too easy on the Fisker Karma, a range-extended plug-in electric luxury sedan built in Finland and imported by the Orange County, Calif.-based company. I really wanted this car to be great, and I have great respect for Henrik Fisker, whose company, having received a highly vetted Department of Energy loan, got smeared during the presidential campaign, a la Solyndra. As unfair as these attacks were, they should have been inadmissible evidence in my judgment of Karma; instead, I found myself rooting for Fisker as an underdog.

In the review, published in February, I tied myself in knots trying to praise the Karma, even resorting to the "world's most interesting car" banality. But in the end, I see in hindsight, the car is too heavy, too overpromised in terms of performance and efficiency, and it is just too durably weird-looking to love. Put a jar in your Fisker Karma, and put a dollar in the jar every time somebody asks you, "What the hell are you driving, mister?" You could put a kid through college that way.

Also, in the article on the Karma, I fumbled this joke: "At 5,300 pounds, the Karma is the heaviest four-seater this side of a Cessna." Flying enthusiasts wrote in to say that I was wildly off the mark. A Cessna 175 weighs about 1,400 pounds. Holy cow, how did I get that so wrong? It's like being asked the weight of a skyscraper and guessing three hens.

In any event, in the second edition, the joke will run thus: "…the heaviest four-seater this side of 3.78 Cessnas." See? Better.

Before leaving the Karma: It will likely surprise the Fisker people to learn I let them off the hook. "The whole thing is pretty overdrawn, for my tastes," I wrote. "The diamond motif is painful. The intersection of the curving shoulder line and the rising front fender line creates a visual slackness at the base of the windshield, making the car look like it's sagging a bit."

It is not uncommon for me to write what I consider to be a fairly positive review, only to have the manufacturer, or some batty enthusiast, accuse me of malice. It all depends on whose investment fund is being gored.

Related:WSJ Rumble Seat columnist Dan Neil on new models and trends the auto industry will unveil in 2013.

The other car I let off the hook? The Dodge Dart. This very fine, very evolved example of global car building—the first fully integrated product collaboration between Chrysler and Fiat, Auburn Hills and Turin—is based on a U.S. variant of an Alfa platform, with a Fiat 1.4-liter Multiair turbo engine under the hood. As I described the engine back in September, it was "awful": "gallingly lazy at low rpm, almost to the point of being dangerous. I had to very deliberately whip the revs up to a shout in order to get the thing to accelerate, and a couple of times—turning left, finding an open spot in opposing traffic—the car absolutely abandoned me."

So far, so good, and true. Now here's my mistake: "I'm happy to report that with the six-speed automatic transmission, the Dart, with either engine [a naturally aspirated 2.0-liter four is an option], is vastly more responsive."

I would like to revise my remarks, changing that "vastly" to "somewhat." In either case, the Dodge Dart's engine-control software economizes too aggressively, leaving the Dart feeling soft and intolerably slow to rouse. The Dart team had every reason to shoot for a big fue- economy number; building more fuel-efficient cars in America was one of the benchmarks in the federal government's loan structuring. But the Dart is a victim of those ambitions.

The good news is that engine-control software can quickly be re-written. I remain hopeful about Dart v2.0.

In a review of the Swedish supercar the Koenigsegg Agera R, I displayed ignorance regarding a common measure of an engine's volumetric efficiency, the Brake Mean Effective Pressure. The Koenigsegg's twin-turbo V8 has "a brake mean effective cylinder pressure (BMAP) of 28 bar, about 406 psi," I wrote, "which would blow most gas engines' spark plugs to the moon."

That's wrong on two counts: First, the abbreviation is BMEP. Second, BMEP represents an average pressure while compression ratio is a way to describe peak cylinder pressure. While the Koenigsegg's 28 bar BMEP is, in fact, a record for a production V8, it is still a mere fraction of the BMEP of, say, a top fuel dragster. In any event, all spark plugs will be staying in their places.

Also in the Agera R review (Oct. 20), I allowed poetry to trample physics. I described the car's ability to, from a standing start, accelerate in excess of 1g, actually gaining speed faster than the acceleration of gravity (9.8 m/s2). "And it is, it feels like, a horizontal roller coaster," I wrote. "At rest, the Agera R always seems poised in space, then hit the gas, over the top, and straight down, bang, bang, bang go the gears. A plunging vertigo takes over, a forward free-fall. The momentum builds in inexorable squares of mass and you scream your face off. Welcome to Six Flags Over Sweden."

The "inexorable squares of mass" line brought out more than a few commenters, who pointed out Newton's Second Law doesn't work like that. I'm still not convinced the line is flat-out wrong: If F=ma, and we know a>9.8 meters/sec^2, and m is 3,200 pounds, then the mass could be said to be "squaring," F = (3,200) 9.8 m/s^2, at least as long is the car accelerating at greater than 1g.

Or I could just admit I was reaching for an effect and failed. Moving on.

Lastly, sorry about the pictures. Cars are actually a huge pain to photograph, and photography is the hardest and most thankless of the journalistic arts. I've never had any talent for it. That said, I pack a ton of heat in my camera bag, and so, occasionally, I'll take a good photo just by virtue of the equipment.

The picture above is such an image. I took it while standing on the side of a country road in Emilia-Romagna, near Modena, in Central Italy, at an hour when the local soccer team was playing. The windows of the butter-yellow houses were shuttered and people were scarce. My friend Aaron Robinson, of Car and Driver fame, was behind the wheel of the Pagani Huayra, and we had spent the day shaking the local capellas and duomos in our borrowed 700-hp, seven-figure hypercar. The Huayra, by the way, leapt to the top of any car lover's all-time greatest list in 2012, shouldering with the Porsche Carrera GT and the McLaren F1.

Aaron wheeled the car around for another pass. I was 20 feet away, kneeling to shoot. A ferocious turbo yelp, a wild flame-front of noise as the car blew past me. I swung the camera lens hard to pan with it, and stumbled. I must have squeezed the shutter button as I was falling down, in just such a way as to keep the car in frame and in focus. The resulting, accidental image captures the Huayra perfectly, an angry archangel, an agent of molecular discord, a missile.

BMW's i3 will feature "Connected" drive, a step toward autonomous driving systems. In September I argued that Americans are less hostile to the notion of robot cars—less likely to see them as a loss of independence—because the American romance with the road is effectively over.

The world's first fully legitimate electric sedan cleaned up on Car of the Year awards. Built in Silicon Valley, this is certainly one the most important cars in history and a triumph of American ingenuity we can all be proud of.

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